Colophon

Published: Fri, Jan 31st 2020

1 min (249 words)

If you want to know a little more about how this site is constructed, the tools that are in use etc then read on.

Website technologies

The website layout and components are all built in React and uses Gatsby to produce a static version of the site. Gatsby then produces a set of raw HTML, JS, CSS and image files which are then put into an S3 bucket in AWS and served via cloudfront.

This results in content that is easily searchable via google and can be delivered to readers very quickly.

Content authoring

Content is authored using Markdown as raw files which are then pulled into Gatsby's data store to process into HTML.

Infrastructure management

Infrastructure is all managed via Terraform which sets up and keeps organised all of the various AWS services such as S3 buckets, Certificates and cloudfront distributions.

Images

Images are a mix of pictures I take myself where needed for a project, sourced from Creative Commons available images in Flickr which are then attributed. As of 2024, some images are now produced for headers using Stable Diffusion, which I do locally. I acknowledge that Generative image models have likely been trained on copyright artwork (including mine) I explicitly do not use prompts that mimic artists' unique style (eg "in the style of... " type prompts).

Gatsby has an excellent image processing system which can produce various sizes of image in order to make the site responsive and keep the page weight as light as possible.